Wrapped Emotions – Picking Through the Pieces

This week’s WE challenge was given by guest blogger, Phyllis. I love visiting her blog, Ima on (and off) the Bima, to see things from her perspective. I think she came up with a great challenge! She asked us to “…break something or cut something or separate something and then put it all back together into a new and beautiful whole.” Our project was to make a mosaic. using materials of our choosing. (Click here to see all the details of the challenge).

My mom and I moved in the middle of my eighth grade year. It was very traumatic for me. I had to leave a place I loved and friends that liked me at a very vulnerable age. It was a difficult transition, so my memories from then are vivid and many are still painful.

Art class, for some reason, really sticks out in my memory. The first project I had to do in my new school was a mosaic using pieces cut from magazines. I think I may have missed the introduction to how mosaics were made, but I thought I understood what was expected of me.

So, I set out to make my creation. I was going to make a rainbow that ended in a heart with my boyfriends name in it. Not a very complicated design, really. Except that I thought it had to be perfect. I can’t tell you how much time I spent trying to cut magazine pages into perfect squares of the exact sames size (about 1 cm). Then I was trying to space them perfectly on the 11 x 17 paper board. And where there was curves, the pieces of different colors had to align exactly to create a perfect square. Can you imagine?

I either turned it in late, or not quite complete (something I NEVER did). I thought that I should still get a high grade because of how well it was done. I think I got a C-. I apparently had missed the whole point. When I saw the other kids’ completed projects and grades, I realized that perfect size and placement was not the goal. Creating something beautiful from imperfect pieces was the idea that completely blew over my head.

This story is an early illustration of me and my tendencies most of my life. I would often spend so much time, effort and emotion trying to do things “just right,” that I would miss the bigger picture and simple joy of the process. I’ve really only started to “get it” over the passed couple of years. I intentionally break the perfectionist tendencies in myself every day. I guess you could call me a recovering perfectionist. I am piecing together a new perspective that allows me to live life. In color, of course.

I used to think that perfectionism was a good trait. Now I know it’s a burden. I would avoid doing things (art, cleaning, etc) because of all the effort I was going to have to put into getting them right. Here are some of my new mantras:

• “Housework done imperfectly still blesses your family.” -FlyLady
• “Anything worth doing is worth doing imperfectly.” -don’t remember where I heard it
• “Perfectionism is neither a spiritual gift nor a godly quality.” -someone I once knew
• “The beauty is in the imperfections!” -Me!

I have often thought about that eighth grade mosaic. To this day, I’ve regretted doing it the way I did and wished that I could do it over. Imagine my delight when I saw this week’s prompt! I used magazines and elmer’s glue, just like I did 24 years ago. I made a picture of the sun rising on the water because of the beauty and color of my new dawn in life.

See the whole picture and go ahead, notice the imperfections! I don’t mind.

Click here to see more WE participants.